Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Grow Your Own Perennial Onions!! Also known as Walking Onions, Egyptian Onions, and Topsetting Onions.

Every part of the Walking Onion plant is edible.
Plant them once and start harvesting the very next year.
The harvest grows larger each year, yielding pounds and pounds of food!
Great fermented, raw, sauted and steamed.

20 bulblets, plants a 4x4 patch of soil and costs $21 including shipping.
They can thrive in ordinary soil in half to full sun.
supplemental watering after they are established.

More info:
I love this plant because it can thrive in poor soil with not too much light. I do not water it! The better the light and soil, the better the plants but you do not need an optimum spot for walking onions.

I harvest pounds and pounds of food from my walking onion patch with almost no work. I have 2 patches that I used to occasionally weed but one patch has developed a native ground cover called henbit, which keeps the weeds down.

$21 gets you 20 onions sets which are little bulblets.They ripen at the top of the plant through early summer. I harvest them in late July/early August and ship them out quickly by priority mail. They should be planted as soon as possible

You will see small scallions growing in the fall. Best to leave them alone.
The following Spring you can cut scallions and use the other parts for freezing for future soups and stews, saute's, fermenting, and marinades.

I love to use the stalks in place of regular onions. The bulbs are fairly small so I usually just leave them in place for a few years. They will multiply over the following winter, doubling the amount of your patch.

Over the years when you have too many plants you can harvest the extra bulbs for winter soups and stews. The plant is called "Walking Onions" because when the sets develop at the top of the plants, the weight of them makes them fall over. Sometimes the sets root themselves outside the boundaries of the patch hence they seem to be "walking" out of their beds.

About Me

I am a musician, organic gardener and improvisational cook. Following the birth of my child, I developed many symptoms and deep exhaustion. It took a decade and a half to recover using alternative treatments, diet change, and fermented foods. Out of this healing experience I developed cook books to share what worked for me. I recently opened a commercial kitchen to sell Gluten-Free Sourdough Bread products. I am always learning.